From Black and White to Technicolor

This paper was presented at CUMREC '99, The College and University Information Services Conference. It is the intellectual property of the author(s). Permission to print out copies of this paper is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage and that the title and authors of the paper appear on the copies. To copy or disseminate otherwise, or to republish in any form, print or electronic, requires written permission from the authors.

From Black and White to Technicolor

Laurianne M. Olcott, Information Technologist
Curriculum Support
Plymouth State College

Plymouth State College's Web Kiosk uses many creative methods to provide students and faculty the applications and queries they commonly use. This paper covers:

* Experiences with ODBC and our database

* Using JAVA to re-write some applications

* Fun with Shockwave and other multimedia applications

* VRML and where it can be implemented

Plymouth State College, like many institutions, is doing away with their character-graphic Kiosk menus. A Web Kiosk was started and many creative methods were used to continue to provide students and faculty with the applications and queries they commonly used in the old Kiosk. Everything from ODBC to JAVA to Shockwave to experimenting with VRML techniques are explored in order to provide information and greatly improve on what we previously offered. There are many creative ways to "keep it interesting". This paper shares the techniques, trials and tribulations of our efforts.

Plymouth State College
From Black and White to Technicolor

The dream

She woke up feeling very awkward. After all, she had spent hours putting together an animated space ship on her terminal using just keyboard characters and Zenith escape sequences. It was a big deal! She was known around campus for creating imaginary and fun images using keyboard characters and then had progressed to animating them. They stunned and amused quite a few people even without the animation, so animating them was a big step. The computer center started replacing the Zenith terminals with VT terminals so oops, the escape characters no longer worked. It was time for ANSI. As it turned out, the transition was not that bad, and she was able to continue her creations.

That morning though, she could not shake the dream ï¿½ there was color on her terminal screen, and the images were like photographs. The waterfalls flowed, the trees swayed, the color was incredible, people looked like people and actually walked around. There was sound, and she could explore everywhere on the screen - without a keyboard! This dream took place in 1986. It has haunted her ever since.

A brief history

During those days of the terminal, most of Plymouth State Collegeï¿½s (PSC) information was accessed via a menu on the administrative mainframes. Students could not view the information due to security reasons, and there were no applications available which were appropriate for student viewing. Student hackers were out there having fun trying to break in to places they were not allowed, which forced us to tighten things up even more. At the same time, the faculty needed access to some of the information, so a main menu was put in place on the administrative machines. As technology progressed, it was eventually decided that some of this information should be available to the students, so a Kiosk system came into place.

Curriculum Support is a sub-division of Undergraduate Studies. We work closely with the Registrarï¿½s office, the students and faculty. Curriculum Support started developing their menus when they decided to share their transfer course and General Education datafiles. This was a very elementary procedure that was easily handled and updated each time new information was added into the datafiles. Pre-set screens were invoked from the menus that displayed different views of the information. We discovered that this information was most valuable when shared with the outside world. What a recruiting tool! Students could see, even before they came to PSC, how the credits they hoped to transfer in would be applied. The Kiosk expanded into a rapidly growing service when LOLA, the Lamson Library Online Lookup Access system, came on board. The library was undergoing reconstruction, and in order to check out books, a person needed to use the electronic system. At the time, very few offices had PCs ï¿½ we used mostly VT terminals, so everything was still primarily terminal based.

Gradually the World Wide Web started to grow and PSC decided to hop on and get linked. This meant various changes to the applications which many people used. PSC uses POISE as their database system, and most of the menu options on the old version of the Kiosk were driven by it. Because the datafiles that POISE generated and the Web were not compatible, we found that the conversion was not all that easy to put in place! The terminals were rapidly being taken away, replaced by PCs, and either resold or stored in closets and only used for special events, such as registration. The World Wide Web was becoming a staple. Now that this has become our new platform, we are going to share our experiences, successes and pitfalls while keeping up with technology, so our spot on the World Wide Web continues to become an interesting place to visit.

Poiseï¿½s Solutions and HTML

Campus America provided PSC with some methods to allow simple queries and outputs to be seen on the Web. These processes worked with some applications but if a program needed a lot of input-output, the process did not always work. A lot of information sharing was done using ODBC and several platforms. The Director of Information Technology Services (ITS) asked us if we could wait until a better method was available and in the meantime he asked, "can you re-write your Course Description Library in JAVA?"

JAVA

Some of our programs needed input/output access (the user had to enter commands, see the result, and enter more data). We could not use ordinary HTML (hypertext) documents. They would not handle the types of tasks that provided the user with database query access. Since we were waiting for the "Hot SQL" server to be installed, Curriculum Supportï¿½s first task was to convert their Course Description Library, previously written in VAX Basic, to JAVA. Although we still could not do queries on the database, we could redesign what we already had, which showed the course descriptions. The old version had a menu of options that were used to search for a particular course, and we decided we could still do that part of the program using JAVA. At the time, none of us had any JAVA experience, so it was time for a crash course! During that summer, we studied the language and got proficient enough to start the new design. Transforming to the new language was not easy because it was so different from the 3^rd generation languages we were so familiar with. Fortunately, familiarity with "C" helped. After many flops and crashes, the new version of the course library finally went up successfully last spring. We are happy to say it does things the old one did not. We thought it was pretty too, with lots of color to define and separate the many options.

PSCï¿½s homepage

Meanwhile the campusï¿½s homepage was being put into place. The Web Committee was created to put together a design, along with some rules and regulations, for us to follow. We wanted our pages to be something to be proud of. Of course, this also meant that all the "pretty" colors we chose for the new Course Library needed to change and the program simplified. So, grumbling all the way, we re-wrote the program to conform to the "suggestions. " During the simplification and modifications, some of the options ended up breaking routines, but after these were fixed, the program came out quite nice (although not as pretty).

The Web version of our Kiosk was started using various methods; some made available by Campus America and others by creative individuals on campus. It consists of both public and secured information, and is known to us as SILAS (Student Information Lookup Access System). James Warner, one of our Computer Science students during his senior project, originally designed this program. The development of it continued to grow and PSC made it a main program on their menu systems. The use of SILAS is one of the first things students learn when they come here, and it is heavily used - especially during the recording of grades. Students have the advantage of seeing what their grades are, before their parents see them, thus, giving these kids a week or so for them to create their "parent preparation speeches." Some of the SILAS options are also extremely useful during registration. When students are wondering if a course they need to take is still available, all they need to do is look it up.

Department creativity

At one of our department-wide meetings, we took a look at what other departments on campus were developing on the Web. Facility Services shared their pages, which consists of maps, building information, their latest projects, our shuttle schedule and other useful links. The Office of Undergraduate Studies posted information so students can learn about warning, probation and severance ï¿½ how to prevent it and what they can do when they find themselves on it. Curriculum Support has been working on pages that involve course descriptions, enrollment reports, Interdisciplinary Studies information among others. Each person in Undergraduate Studies and Curriculum Support has some animation on their pages somewhere! (The users who know the staff at Curriculum Support can tell that the dream is still haunting their programmer, but she is having fun.) News can be easily submitted to News Services via the Web, including pictures or URLs (Universal Resource Locator). LOLA has a huge section that contains everything a student would want to know about the Library. Information Technology Services has pages that allow offices to order computer equipment and sign up for workshops. ITS also put in place an Intranet page for faculty and staff offices, allowing quick access to applications not necessarily available to the outside world. PSCï¿½s pages are continuing to grow and explode into one powerful (and fun) tool.

OOPS, my word processor does not want to create my HTML tables anymore

Placing reports on the World Wide Web once was an easy task. All the author needed to do was to use the conversion option in their word processor, which changed the document to an HTML document. After that, the document was posted on the Web with very little trouble. This method was great! Anyone could create pages easily and lots of non-experts were doing it - until the word processor we used suddenly did not want do the HTML conversion properly when we tried to convert table-style reports. It happened when we moved to another version. Every time we tried to save the report as an HTML document, it would scrunch everything up and not recognize the formats we had previously used. No matter what we tried, we could not find an easy solution. It was rather frustrating.

Other methods used for getting those reports online

A solution to this was to look into different applications. Some people manually made the alterations and used the </pre> method. That was time-consuming. Others read their tables into a spreadsheet application that converted easily. That, too, was time consuming because the reports had to go from one application and then into another. Because of the way that some reports were generated, they ended up not fitting into a spreadsheet that easily.

The method we are using now does require an extra plug-in, but at least the faculty can view and print the reports online. The downside to this is that not everyone wants to take the trouble to install that plug-in. Many users are still learning what a plug-in is, never mind installing them! Most of the users in that category have everything installed for them, so the thought of installing anything themselves, is kind of scary. Using plug-in applications may not be a permanent solution for us, but it is working for now, until we come up with a different way to display the reports.

Keeping the studentï¿½s interest

Most kids like to play video games. We noticed in the computer clusters that a lot of the students, (almost too many of them) instead of exploring the pages of PSC, would immediately go someplace else. A lot of our information was not being used, and its value lost, because the students did not notice it. It just did not grab them. The students do love to surf ï¿½ elsewhere! With that thought, an idea Curriculum Support recently had was to put together an "underground" view of PSC. By using VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), and combining it with other techniques, we planned to have a virtual reality version of the college and a "different" way to get the students to view the many pages that departments worked on so hard. The hope we have is, one day the students will notice, and start to see more of what is happening on campus. ITS is currently working on a version of this which we, at Curriculum Support, hope to merge with what we have been doing.

VRML

Often, some people do not know what true 3-D really looks like and what it is like to experience it on a computer screen. We have seen animations, sounds, pretty pictures that seem so life-like, yet are not really the 3-D version we envisioned. Fancy things can be done using Shockwave and JAVA applets, but even these were not what we had in mind. PSC has an excellent Virtual Tour, which a student at ITS put together using Shockwave. It is a great beginning link or can be an excellent link when the user is surfing from one department page to another, but Curriculum Support envisioned more and decided to take a stab at something new ourselves. Having worked with a lot of the students day after day, we felt we were "in tune" with them enough to try some things which might attract them to our pages.

We studied some applications over the late spring and summer of 1998 and came up with one that showed promise. We contacted the company who developed the application that creates "worlds" and worked with some of their programmers when we came up against some silly bugs. Not only were the programmers very helpful, but they were completely supportive of our efforts.

Using this application, the user can view images, at all angles. This is done using a plug-in that was part of our standard browser setup. Not only can a person go around an object, but actually enter inside it and look out of it, like a window view looking out from the floor of a building. The user can also explore the hallways within a building. Components, modified by the programmer, can do things, such as, reflect pictures of the campus on pseudo-terminal screens. The user can choose one of these screens, click on it and actually enter into that picture (or "world"). Size is relative, so the imagination can go into overload if the programmer lets it. This is so much like that "dream" that this programmer is still haunted by! She started having it, again when she started working with this material. Of course, now that dream is not quite so intimidating. We are a little stuck with the available components supplied with the software; some of it can be modified, but a component editor is on its way. As this paper is being written, the component editor is still being beta-tested, so we are waiting for its arrival.

The one thing this package does not have yet, is the ability for people to chat. There are 3-D chat sites out there where a user can enter the "world" as an "avatar" character, walk or float around to explore, and talk to others from around the world. At Curriculum Support we decided to look into those options in more detail. We thought, "Wouldn’t it be nice if a student already had some contact with other people on campus via this means before they come to PSC. These students would already have started to make new friends, and from the various studies and surveys we have seen, this improves retention."

Not quite VRML

We visited a couple of chat sites and left e-mail messages, of our intentions, to the companies. Finally, one company got back to us with a reply that the code they use is not VRML based, but done using a high-speed 3D game technology-based engine. They put in a lot of work in it and its components to reduce download time. Their entire world system is single-streamed and immediately mapped to the existing world or community. This is also enhanced with browser caching. The more the user steps on things or enters rooms, the more of the world is downloaded and displayed. The client is free to the user. The server, written in JAVA, is not. After viewing the pricing for such a setup we decided we could not go this route, at least for now. We will have to find alternate methods to develop any kind of chat-world for the virtual campus. It was time to go back and investigate the program development we originally started using.

OOPS there are changes with our browser’s default plug-ins!

A similar problem, like the one with the word processor, appeared, although more fixable. Curriculum Support’s programmer installed the newest version of our browser for testing. At first we did not know why it was so much smaller than the last version, but soon found out why, to our dismay. The plug-in we used to activate the VRML worlds was no longer a part of the default setup. At that point things started to look rather glum for the project. We knew that, after the experience with the other plug-in and new users, this would have to be one of those things downloaded by the user. This posed a bit of a problem, but through communication with ITS, possibly a solution can be worked out.

Pictures, pictures and more pictures

Other methods of simulating 3D were considered. Although these options were not as nice as what we were originally intending, under the circumstances we thought we would explore them. What we had in mind, was to take pictures of all the sides of our buildings and areas around the campus. The more pictures the better – especially pictures displaying the gorgeous autumn leaves still bright on the trees. Unfortunately, the weather did not cooperate with our efforts, and we were greeted with rainy, gloomy days during the peak of fall foliage. No matter how we touched up the pictures, it seemed futile. We were going to take these pictures and create image maps that linked together. We were hoping to use these in conjunction with our existing project, to enhance it, and make it look more like the real PSC, and not a surrealistic PSC. For now, we are just hanging on to the pictures and waiting for the component editor.

Re-investigating chat with 3D capabilities

In the meantime, we are still exploring what is out there and affordable to us. At this point, we are approaching the stage of planning our own version of a chat routine written in JAVA. Of course, the easiest route is to get ITS to install a chat server, but that might not be a possibility, due to student abuse of such a server. Back in the days of terminals, "gaming" students monopolized terminals using Internet relay chats (they called it "mudding"), thus preventing the students who wanted to use the terminal for homework from using it. To ask for such a server might not be received very well. An alternative could be a JAVA program that streams a conversation into a file that keeps on appending until it reaches a certain limit. Though the conversations would not exactly be real-time, they would still exist and students could communicate. Curriculum Support’s programmer runs an old FIDONET Bulletin board that has a game installed on it which does something similar. The kids use it and it seems to work for them.

A "chat" conversation takes place in particular "rooms" or areas on campus. These chats are oriented to a particular subject or pertaining only to specific departmental information. Students can either communicate with each other, or contact department staff or faculty. This type of chat is a lot like e-mail in which the responses are more like an on-going e-mail discussion or USENET news group. The only difference is that it is contained all on one page (per department area) instead of many individual messages. So, now we have thought up a surrealistic chat to go with the surrealistic campus…

Crash, burn and back to the drawing board again?

Crash and burn, time to reboot! The programmer just hangs in there, patiently waiting for her PC to come back up, only to get to "that magic test point" and have it crash once again. "Is this all worth it?" That thought happens to us a lot on various difficult projects. Just when we take a few steps ahead, we are finding ourselves moved one step back – and they add up! All the "fun" of this project aside, we still believe in it and are constantly pushing forward to make it happen. We figure that by this spring, something will be put into place, probably a huge coordinated effort between us, ITS and other developers on campus. All Campus Web Day is approaching, which is a good time to show projects and compare notes. We know that the project will be huge once it is underway, and will need many experts in several areas. We are not even sure if it will do what we hope to have happen, but it is worth a try. We finally have our demonstrations ready, and now need to get the word out to other people on campus and let them know of our intentions.

A possible student Senior Project

Programmers on campus are not always staff members. Every semester our Computer Science Department has their seniors do senior projects. A lot of the students do not know what to pick or can not find a "client" who will hire them to do a project. We see this 3D project as one for quite a few students lasting for a number years. We also see the project bringing other members of the campus community together. Projects like this usually do not have a "final – this is it" to them. Both technology and the campus are always changing and we believe opportunities will be there for the Computer Science students and creative staff for years to come. There could also be opportunity for students studying in the Graphic Arts. Reasons like these keep our office from getting too discouraged with this project, even after all these pitfalls.

Our queries are finally going on the Web

Whew! Back to reality and back to the down-to-earth projects. Curriculum Support has been waiting patiently for the Hot SQL server to go up so. We still need to provide users with access to our Transfer Credit information and also our General Education information. Those two projects got lost in the shuffle when the old menus were disabled in favor of using the Web Kiosk. One day we were greeted with an e-mail message from ITS stating that the old menu (which some people were still using) had been disabled. Although we knew this was going to happen, we had no means of providing this information.

We tried using the ODBC administrator, which crashed every time due to security/permission problems. We could access the information ourselves but no one else could and that was frustrating. When we saw that some other departments were able to provide queries, we asked about it only to find that they used the method we were told not to.

Finally, we got a call that it would be only a few days until the new server would be up. During that time we got some other interesting information regarding one thing we presumed was under control. The new programs for the year 2000 were undergoing testing and we were asked if we could fix a bug in one of them. We also got involved on the year 2000 team.

Conclusion, the impact of the year 2000

There is something about the word "assume" that often makes a person want to scream and run away. We assume that the companies and programmers have everything under control in preparation for the date change. We assume that not too many things will go wrong. We know that a lot of work will need to be done to make sure the modifications of the dates in our datafiles do not affect other applications. Fortunately, the course library will be ok, but all our datafiles will need to be converted. Sometimes it feels as if we are trying to do too many things at the same time. We are hoping that not only will the conversion take place smoothly, but that all our Web efforts will continue just as smoothly. One does affect the other for some projects. It appears that there may have to be some hardware changes for the machines that are not capable of handling the new date. It does take a little time to load the plug-in used to run the Virtual Reality software, so this means that if all the newly installed PCs are faster ones, load time will be less of an issue. We are also trying to envision what a machine made in the year 2000 will be like. Perhaps we will not need to worry about plug-ins anymore? Will all plug-ins be automatically installed in browser packages? How big are these programs going to be and are we going to have (what comes after gig) drives? Well, in any case, we know that no matter what it is going to be like, we will still have our projects - and, of course, our dreams.